


bleeding out

by sinistercacophony



Category: Produce 101 (TV), Wanna One (Band)
Genre: Body Horror, Don't worry there's a happy ending, Gen, Ghosts, Implied Sexual Abuse, Murder, Witches, like all of maknae line are dead except jihoon im sorry, some gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-29
Updated: 2017-10-29
Packaged: 2019-01-26 06:42:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12551488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinistercacophony/pseuds/sinistercacophony
Summary: “You need to get out of here. It’s not safe after dark.”The boy reaches up to the cut on his cheek and swipes his finger through the blood there. Jihoon is frozen as the boy reaches for his face and swipes the blood across his forehead.“That should protect you for a little bit,” he says. In the dimming light, his eyes are taking on an eerie quality. The silence of the forest is becoming oppressive, almost like a humming in Jihoon’s ears. “Now go.”





	bleeding out

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote a halloween fic!! yay!! please mind the tags! nothing is super graphic or in depth in my opinion but im also really desensitized to horror movies so like,, be careful. i had a lot of fun writing this ;_; ive always wanted to write a horror and this was my first stab at it :D enjoy!

The house they move into six months after Jihoon’s father leaves isn’t particularly large, but it feels empty nonetheless. 

His mother is silent and awkward when she is there, but more often than not she’s away on her business trips, burying her grief in work, avoiding Jihoon and his striking resemblance to his father as much as possible. 

They’d moved out into the country, on the outskirts of Busan, because his mother claimed that ‘fresh air would help them heal. 

Privately, Jihoon just thinks it’s so there’s no one around to question the fact that he’s a teenage boy living mostly on his own. He takes the bus into town for school and to buy groceries. The closest neighbor lives down the street, a man in his mid-thirties that gives Jihoon strange looks as he waits for the bus.

Then there’s the forest. It surrounds the house, edging it in on three sides, and frankly it gives Jihoon the creeps. When they’d first moved in, his mother had kicked him out of the house while the movers shoved furniture around and brought in boxes. He’d wandered down the little winding path leading in, and the further he’d gone the more he’d felt like something was watching him, following him. The forest hadn’t been particularly dense, but the silence had been thick and the creeping feeling up his spine had only worsened the further in he’d gone. 

Eventually he’d been scared off, power walking back to the house, too stubborn to run but desperately wanting to. 

He plans on never going back in if he can help it. 

Unfortunately, Amu decides to run off into the woods when his mother distractedly leaves the door open bringing in groceries. She calls Jihoon down, sounding more annoyed than regretful that she’d released Jihoon’s fat housecat into the woods where she could potentially be eaten by foxes or something. 

Jihoon sucks it up and goes into the woods. He stays on the path, calling Amu’s name as he walks along. He’d probably find her faster if he went foraging through the underbrush, but his instincts scream at him that that is a _terrible_ idea. 

So he walks down the path into the woods, deeper and deeper, slowly losing hope that Amu will appear. The woods are silent except for his calls. It’s fucking creepy. There are no chirping birds or buzzing insects. No rustles in the underbrush from small mammals or deer.

Jihoon is about to give up. He can feel the heavy ball of a sob growing at the bottom of his throat. He’s not sure how he’ll manage with the only living thing he could consider a friend gone. It’s maybe a little pathetic, but no one’s here to see. The ball of anxiety in his gut sinks deeper.

He’s interrupted from his private grieving by a shout coming down the path behind him. He turns to see a boy approaching, holding Amu in his arms. Amu is wide eyed and squirming, and when she sees Jihoon she starts meowing plaintively. Jihoon breathes out heavily in relief, holding out his arms to take the cat. When she’s finally safely in his arms, Jihoon pauses to get a good look at the boy. 

He’s tan, with sharp eyes and an undercut. There’s a cut on his cheek that’s bleeding sluggishly. 

“Thanks for finding her,” Jihoon tells him. “Are you...okay?” He makes a vague gesture at the boy’s cheek, as best he can with his arms full of cat. 

The boy gives him a small smile. “It’s no problem.” His Busan accent is heavy. “I was just wandering around and I saw her.” He doesn’t adress the cut. 

The boy glances around nervously. The sun is starting to set, and Jihoon is feeling a little on edge too. 

“You need to get out of here. It’s not safe after dark.” 

Jihoon nods slowly. The general feeling of doom the forest gives off is only increasing as the sun dips down in the sky. 

The boy reaches up to the cut on his cheek and swipes his finger through the blood there. Jihoon is frozen as the boy reaches for his face and swipes the blood across his forehead. 

“That should protect you for a little bit,” he says. In the dimming light, his eyes are taking on an eerie quality. The silence of the forest is becoming oppressive, almost like a humming in Jihoon’s ears. “Now go.” 

Jihoon goes. When he glances back, the boy is standing in the path watching Jihoon. The darkening forest seems almost alive behind him, a strange miasma of shadows and figures. 

Jihoon runs. 

\-- 

Jihoon makes sure Amu doesn’t get out again after that, keeping her in his room when his mom is home to prevent any escapes from happening again. 

The whole incident does serve to make him more curious about the woods than he is afraid. It’s probably not smart, but after a couple trips to the local library, he goes back. 

He goes during the afternoon, after school, with plenty of time before sunset. He doesn’t go in very far, just enough that he can’t see the house through the trees. He picks out a tree stump and sits on it. 

He waits. 

As the sun starts edging down the horizon, Jihoon starts to get nervous. He’s just considering heading back to the house before it gets too dark, too dangerous, when he hears gentle footsteps coming down the path. 

The boy looks worse for wear. His hoodie is torn and stained with blood and dirt. The cut on his cheek is bleeding more heavily this time, streaking down his face sharply and dripping onto the collar of his hoodie. 

He and Jihoon stare at each other for a moment before Jihoon speaks. 

“Park Woojin.” 

It hadn’t been hard to find information on the boys who’d gone missing in these woods starting back ten years ago. There’d even been pictures. 

Woojin had been the most recent missing boy, vanishing two years ago over the summer when his parents had left for a week to go on a cruise. He’d been sixteen. 

Standing right in front of Jihoon now, he looks the same as he had in the faded newspaper clippings, face unchanged. 

Woojin grins at Jihoon at the sound of his own name. He has a snaggletooth. If Woojin wasn’t dead Jihoon would probably think he was pretty cute. 

Jihoon smiles back. 

He pulls out the knife he’d stashed in the pocket of his hoodie. It’s one of the sharp ones from the kitchen that his mother uses to trim the fat off meat when she cooks (not often). He holds it up to his palm and makes a long thin cut. It stings a little bit but Jihoon doesn’t flinch. 

Some of the information in the library had been useful, but more useful had been the couple at the hippie-looking incense shop he’d wandered into while looking for information on spirits. When he’d asked about the woods they’d looked at him knowingly and handed him a heavily bound book, full of thin loopy script. They’d told him to call them up if he had any questions, but the looks on their faces told him that this was something he mostly had to do on his own. 

Jihoon holds his bleeding hand out to Woojin, palm up. Woojin’s grin widens, and he as he walks towards Jihoon he reaches up to run his fingers through the blood on his face. 

When his hand touches Jihoon’s it feels electric. 

The blood from Woojin’s cut is flowing faster, pooling in the curve of his throat and dripping onto the dirt path. It starts coming from his eyes, his nose, trickling from his gums and his scalp. 

His smile is bloody and his eyes are bright and his grip on Jihoon’s hand is firm. “Find my body,” he tells Jihoon. “Don’t stay out after dark. You’ll have to find everyone else too.” 

Shakily, Jihoon nods. 

“Don’t die. Please,” Woojin tells him. 

And then he’s gone, vanished into thin air except for the blood spotting the dirt along the path and smeared along Jihoon’s palm. 

When Jihoon rubs it away the cut is healed into a thin white line. It could be be mistaken for a childhood scar. 

Jihoon smiles to himself. He’s ready. 

\-- 

Finding the bodies turns out to be more taxing than Jihoon anticipated. He ends up going back to the incense shop to get ingredients for a tracking spell. While he waits at the bus stop, the man from down the street approaches him to make small talk. 

Jihoon barely processes their conversation. It's small talk, unobtrusive questions about the weather and how he's settling in. He responds with one word answers, shifting uncomfortably as the man eyes him up and down in a way that is distinctly predatory. He sits next to Jihoon on the bench, slightly too close for Jihoon's comfort, and Jihoon has to restrain himself from physically shifting away.

The man puts his hand on Jihoon's upper arm. Jihoon isn't used to feeling helpless or vulnerable, but the touch makes him want to shrink into a ball and melt into the ground. 

Jihoon is considering feigning a text from his mother and going back to the house when the bus turns around the corner. Thank god. He stands abruptly. Before the bus arrives he turns and asks the man, "How long have you been living here, by the way?" 

The man gives him a thin smile, and it feels like slime crawling down Jihoon's spine. "Oh you know, around ten years or so."

Jihoon thinks Woojin. He thinks about the other boys who'd been reported missing, Lee Daehwi, Bae Jinyoung. He feels some sort of resolve clench in his gut, as he stands under the eyes of this man, this monster. 

He gets on the bus. As it pulls away, he watches out the window, his feet pulled up to his chest, curled up as small as he can. The man doesn't move, just watching until the bus turns the corner. 

Jihoon's hands don't stop shaking until he reaches the incense shop. 

Jaehwan and Minhyun load him up with spices and herbs and other tidbits of ingredients he might need for spells. 

They also give him a knife. It's long and sharp and carved with runes and when Jihoon holds it it gives him a sense of security he didn't know he'd lost. 

When he tells Minhyun about the man talking to him at the bus stop Minhyun frowns slightly before going into the back. When he comes out he presents Jihoon with another knife. This one is a switchblade, small and thin, that Jihoon can keep in his pocket at all times. 

It's comforting, having it. Just in case. 

\-- 

The charm he puts together is a little pouch full of spices and feathers, tied together with a piece of string. It smells very strongly of cinnamon and it heats up a little in his hand as he murmurs the words the book gave him over it. 

Jaehwan had told him that it wasn't the exact objects or spells that were important but the intent and power behind them. It made things easier, in a lot of ways, knowing he didn't have to be perfect for things to work. 

The first set of bones he finds are not Woojin's. 

He follows the pull of the charm until it becomes so hot in his hands he can barely hold on. The spot it leads him to is not particularly special, just a tall tree where the packet in his hand starts to smoulder into ash. The scent it gives off smells like rot as it dissolves away. 

He starts digging. It takes an hour to find the bones, clustered in a little heap together, piled up in a way that suggests the limbs had not been attached when they'd been buried. 

About halfway through he looks up to see a boy perched on a stump near the hole he's digging. He's frail and delicate, with large haunted eyes and bird thin wrists. 

He looks about fourteen. Jihoon recognizes his face from the news articles. Lee Daehwi.

There's a bruise on his cheekbone and shadows under his eyes, like even before his last moments he'd been haunted by the man stalking him. 

Ghosts aren't the scary ones, Jihoon thinks. Living people seem far worse. 

\-- 

Jihoon isn't sure what to do with the bones. He leaves them in the shed out behind the house. Daehwi seems to linger around the backyard for the most part. He doesn't respond when Jihoon tries to talk to him. Maybe he can't anymore. He'd been the first boy to go missing. That was eight years ago. 

Jihoon goes back through the newspaper clippings he'd taken from the library. Daehwi had been thirteen when he'd vanished, in his last year of middle school. He'd gone to school and then never come back. He hadn't had very many friends, so nobody had noticed when he hadn't shown up, at least not until he hadn't gone home. 

Someone had reported seeing him downtown, and police had questioned all the shopkeepers and business owners. They hadn't found any information. 

Jihoon bets Daehwi had never made it to the bus in the first place. 

The next day Jihoon makes another packet and goes back into the woods. 

This time the ghost he finds attached to the bones is not one he recognizes from the newspapers. Only three boys had gone missing in the past ten years, spaced far enough apart that most of the time they'd been thought of as isolated incidents. 

The bones he finds are brittle and rotted and they look older than Daehwi's. 

The boy is tall and handsome, with heavy eyes and tousled hair. 

He looks _very_ similar to the man down the street. 

When Jihoon realizes this he has to stumble into the woods to vomit. 

When he gets home he thinks about the two ghost boys in his backyard and can't stop himself from crying. He might be in a little over his head. 

He could stop now. He could burn the bones and tell his mother that the man down the street tried to hurt him. Then it would be over, the man would go to jail, especially if they connected him to the other missing boys. No one else would get hurt again. 

He thinks about Woojin. About his bloody grin, and how tightly he'd gripped Jihoon's hand. About how he'd given Jihoon's cat back when she'd been lost in the woods with who knows what. 

There are things in the woods beyond the man down the street, and beyond the bones he's buried. When Jihoon was digging he felt eyes on him, watching waiting. 

He has to save Woojin, he decides. He's not sure from what -- Woojin is already dead after all -- but Jihoon knows in his gut that there are worse things to be. 

The next day he digs up Bae Jinyoung's bones. 

Jinyoung can talk. He'd vanished a couple years before Woojin. Jihoon's theory is that the older the ghosts get the less they can communicate with the living world. 

The less human they become. 

Sometimes out of the corner of his eye, Daehwi's eyes seem to flash black, or his skin will be textured and rough, like tree bark. 

The mystery boy is worse. Jihoon sees decaying flesh, the white flash of a jawbone, rotting skin and sharp teeth. 

Bae Jinyoung tells Jihoon that he needs to hurry. 

Jihoon is well aware. 

\-- 

When he goes into the woods next, the pouch leads him deeper and deeper and deeper into the forest. The man must have become paranoid. From the articles Jihoon had read he'd been a suspect when Woojin had gone missing but they hadn't found the body so they hadn't been able to prove anything. 

The pressure of the forest is almost suffocating this far in. The deeper he goes the thicker the trees become, the heavier the silence grows, the harder Jihoon's heart beats in his chest. 

The tree he's lead to this time is dead, its huge dry branches climbing towards the sky like fractured bones. 

Jihoon digs. 

And digs. 

And digs. 

Darkness falls around him. 

He keeps digging. 

When he finally finds the bones he clutches them to his chest and breathes out a sigh of relief. The hole he's in is so deep that as he crouches down his head is below the edge. He can feel the things in the woods around him, peering in, watching him. 

Arms wrap around him from behind, and when he turns it’s Woojin, his grin snaggletoothed and blood free. 

"We have to wait till dawn," Woojin says, "It's not safe." 

Jihoon nods. The switchblade in his pocket can't protect him from these spirits. Not against their thin grasping fingers, their hollow eyes, their teeth sharp with anticipation. 

He buries his face in Woojin's chest. Woojin feels real, alive, not like a ghost at all. His heart is beating steadily in Jihoon's ear, his chest is warm and his breaths are heavy and comforting. 

Jihoon doesn't sleep that night. He doesn't think Woojin could protect him if he did. 

When dawn comes it does so slowly, creeping through the underbrush like a timid animal. 

Jihoon and Woojin walk out of the woods hand in hand.

\-- 

Jihoon spends the rest of the day sleeping. Technically he has school but his mother isn't there to wake him or nag him about skipping so he uses was little time he has to rest. He knows he has to deal with the ghosts and their bones tonight. 

He wakes up to the mystery boy standing over his bed, watching him. The look in his eyes is predatory.

When he peeks out the window the man from down the street is at the bus stop, watching the house. 

When he carries all of the bones into the woods together they are heavy in his arms, more than the sum of their frail broken parts. 

The sun is high in the sky as he sets up for the ritual, pouring salt in a clumsy circle, drawing runes and sigils in with shaky hands. It's the intent that matters, he reminds himself, it doesn't have to be perfect. 

The bones each go at a point in the pentagram. At the fifth point he places the head of a deer he'd found rotting by the side of the road a couple days ago. It's not quite the same, but it should work well enough in the absence of a fifth body. 

He covers the circle with leaves, hiding it from view.

When he's done setting up he goes back to the house to wait till sunset. 

He calls his mother and it goes to voicemail. He tells her that he loves her and that he's thinking of her and that he hopes she has a good day. 

He calls Jaehwan and Minhyun and tells them that he's planning to move tonight, and that they should call the police if he doesn't call them back in the morning. He tells them where to look for the body. 

He'd asked them once why they'd never taken care of the man themselves, why they'd never reported him to the police. Minhyun had said that the man had stronger forces on his side than just good luck. Minhyun and Jaehwan had too much self preservation to fuck with that. 

Jihoon wonders what that says about him. 

When the sun starts to dip in the sky, he goes to the bus stop and waits. It doesn't take long for the man to approach him. Jihoon lets the man slide a hand around his waist, lets the man lead him into the woods, speaking softly about how Jihoon will enjoy it, just wait. Jihoon smiles at him with false shyness even as his stomach twists and his skin crawls. The rune carved knife is heavy in the waistband of his pants. 

When the walk through the clearing Jihoon waits until they are in the center to hesitate, to pull back. The man smiles, grabs him roughly by the wrist, hard enough to bruise. Strong enough that Jihoon can't escape. 

Jihoon doesn't need to escape. He reaches for the knife, twisting in the man's grip, pulling and tugging until he can sink the blade through his chest. 

It's more difficult than he thought it'd be, stabbing someone. The ribcage is hard, and he has to push to feel it crack under the force of pressure. Jihoon keeps pushing until there's blood flowing heavily against his fingers and the man is gasping, collapsing, coughing up blood and vomit and saliva. 

For a moment Jihoon just sits, gasping, hands clenched around the hilt of the knife he'd just stabbed into a man's chest. 

He feels the circle activate as the man bleeds into it. He feels the forest awaken around him, full of mutters and clicks and hisses that belong to things not quite human. He sees the boy, the one he never had a name for, standing at the edge of the clearing. He's not quite human anymore either. 

Jihoon doesn't wait around to see what happens next. What happens to the others.

When he exits the clearing the creatures part around him, he's given them what they want tonight, so they'll let him go. Magic is about balance too. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. 

The next morning there's a knock on the door. When Jihoon checks the time, it’s early in the morning. Dawn. 

The events of the previous night seem like a dream, so far away they seem impossible. 

They seem less so when he opens the door to Park Woojin's lopsided grin. 

Intent, Jihoon thinks, and balance.

A life for a life. 

Jihoon grins back.

**Author's Note:**

> come find me over on twitter [@sweetwoojinie](https://twitter.com/sweetwoojinie)
> 
> thanks for reading!


End file.
